New this week from Solitary Watch:

In the latest piece from the Ridgeway Reporting Project, Nicholas Brooks, a writer currently incarcerated at Green Haven Correctional Facility in New York, examines forced prison labor within the state’s Department of Corrections and across the United States. While incarcerated at Sullivan Correctional Facility, Brooks worked in the prison’s kitchen for “cents an hour.” The piece highlights how incarcerated people are susceptible to punishment, such as solitary confinement, if they refuse to work because the 13th Amendment abolished slavery and indentured servitude “except as punishment for a crime.”  Solitary Watch

This week’s pick of news and commentary about solitary confinement:

President Trump announced over his Truth Social platform that he was facilitating the rebuilding and reopening of Alcatraz, a former federal prison on an island a mile into the San Francisco Bay. Alcatraz officially closed 62 years ago after the federal government deemed it both inadequate to house incarcerated people and too expensive. It is now a museum that attracts around 1.4 million visitors a year. The Director of the Bureau of Prisons, William K. Marshall III, asserted that the Trump Administration would follow through on the President’s proposed project, and he had initiated an immediate assessment of the former federal prison. “We look forward to restoring this powerful symbol of law, order, and justice,” said Marshall in a statement. “We will be actively working with our law enforcement and other federal partners to reinstate this very important mission.” NY Times

Various reports found that Jackson Parish Jail, which has housed children since 2023, violated 83 state regulations between July 2024 and February 2025. Licensing specialists from the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) uncovered that various rights, such as access to educational and therapeutic services, were denied to children held at the jail. Children at Jackson Parish Jail allege they regularly interact with the jail’s adult population and that staff physically abuse them, spray them with mace, shoot at them with pepper balls, and isolate them in solitary confinement. Additionally, OJJ inspectors discovered that staff mishandled suicide attempts on various occasions. The Appeal

Investigators found that immigration detention facilities across California failed to provide individuals with adequate mental health services. The California Department of Justice’s report discovered that these facilities routinely placed individuals with serious mental health conditions into solitary confinement, in some cases for months at a time, despite the practice being known to worsen mental health struggles. Additionally, the report found that every facility lacked proper suicide prevention and intervention procedures. CalMatters

In New York prisons and jails, nurses must often choose between reporting correctional officers for physically abusing incarcerated people or covering up the abuse. The Marshall Project found 61 allegations of nurses hiding abuse in the state’s prisons between 2010 and 2024, often by declining to document injuries or not performing medical examinations altogether. In one case, a Nurse allegedly medically cleared a man to be placed in solitary confinement after correctional officers gave him “life-threatening injuries.” The Gothamist

The Suffolk Superior Court in Massachusetts granted class certification to around 200 incarcerated people in the state’s correctional system in an ongoing lawsuit against the state’s Department of Corrections and its solitary confinement practices. The lawsuit, which was filed by the BC Law Civil Rights Clinic, Holland & Knight, and Prisoners’ Legal Services, alleges that two units within the DOC violate the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Reform Act by giving individuals little to no time out of solitary confinement. The ruling allows the case to gather vital evidence, a significant win for the lawsuit. Law Magazine 

In a piece for Prism, incarcerated writer Robert Pastore writes about how a three-week-long illegal strike by New York Correctional Officers has indefinitely changed various aspects of prison life. It highlights how, in response to the strike, the state’s Department of Corrections suspended parts of the HALT Act, which puts restrictions on solitary confinement in state prisons, and further barred individuals from earning their GEDs or trade certifications during out-of-cell time. “At the height of the strike, we endured lockdown in our cells and continued our custom of waiting,” Patore writes. “Now, we are waiting to see if our rights will be protected.” Prism

Get this weekly roundup in your mail every Wednesday, covering the past seven days of solitary confinement news and commentary. Subscribe today.
The work we do is made possible by your support. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation—large or small—today.